Monday, September 6, 2010

Curent Light Reading

This book has popped up in numerous places as I've surfed the web-ether over the last few years so I finally got around to reading it. I reserved a copy at the library, all copies in Portland seem to be on constant hold, and picked it up a week and a half ago. I was in the middle of another novel so it sat on my nightstand for a week before I got to it. Now I'm barely 1/5th of the way into it and I'm getting emails from the library telling me it's due in a couple of days. I can't renew it because it's already on reserve by someone else.

So far it's such a good read that I know I'll want to re-read it again in the future, so I scrambled through Powell's website and ran out and bought my own copy yesterday. The library's copy was a huge hardcover that's difficult to hold while reading in bed. The copy I found is a standard sized small paperback and was only $6.95 used.

I'm not able to post a quote from the book here . . . simply put, there are way too many good quotes to chose from.

I'm hoping for some bit of a happy ending. It will be incredibly sad if the honest and brave, hard-working, capitalist loses to the insane anti-logic of the utopian socialists.

P.S. It kept popping up on the web as relevant to current events that I was bowled over to find it was written in 1957!

3 comments:

"(Our president seems to have inspired — which is not quite the word — half the country to read Miss Rand, and I wanted to remind myself what she was teaching them.)" --Jason Lee SteortsArticle here:http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/244381/greatly-ghastly-rand-jason-lee-steortsAnd a follow up:http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/244497/ayn-rand-and-whittaker-chambers-jason-lee-steortsAnd the grandaddy article, the one by Whittaker Chambers:http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/222482/big-sister-watching-you/flashback I think reading Rand is an eminently worthwhile thing, and ideally should be done at a young age. And then one must mature enough to realize what a horrid, nasty woman she was, and beyond the ad hominem, that her so-called philosophy is about as intellectually sound as Marxism. But again, it is worth knowing what the "going Galt" references are all about, and understanding the impulse behind them.

I should have added that I read most of Rand in high school and college, and enjoyed it immensely. It is only in later years that I've found contrary opinions of her, and it has been quite an education to reflect on and resolve the differing viewpoints. Again, I think it very much worth the time to slog through it all.

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Reagan

"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions." -Reagan

Thatcher

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money.